In the 1930s Many Ignored Hitler. Now, It’s Global Warming.

Walter
G. Moss is a professor emeritus of history at Eastern Michigan
University and Contributing Editor of HNN. For a list of his recent
books and online publications, click here.

Since
the election of Donald Trump, we have been inundated with an
abundance of analysis. This present essay makes only one point about
this already infamous election: the dangers of global warming and
climate change were largely ignored or denied by most voters. Various
exit polls make this clear.

How
can this be? The global-warming issue is decades old, of momentous
importance, and is getting worse. Already in the 1980s, Congressman
Al Gore
organized congressional hearings on the
subject. Since 1995 numerous reports by the UN’s Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), relying on more than 2,000 scientists
worldwide, have cited increasing evidence of human-caused global
warming. By 2009, the Academies of Science of the world’s major
countries, plus 84 percent of U.S. scientists, agreed that our earth
was getting warmer because of human activity.

In
2015, NASA indicated that
“the 10 warmest years in the 134-year record all have occurred
since 2000, with the exception of 1998. The year 2015 ranks as the
warmest on record," and 2016 gives
every indication of being even hotter.
Furthermore, natural disasters like droughts, wildfires, melting ice
caps, and flooding, all made more likely by global warming, are
increasing in intensity and already causing great misery. And there
was evidence, as a March
2016 Gallup Poll indicated, that more
Americans (64 percent) “worried a ‘great deal’ or ‘fair
amount’ about global warming,” up from 55 percent a year earlier.

In
2015 Pope Francis issued
an encyclical in which he wrote of the
necessity of making “radical decisions to reverse the trend of
global warming” in the interest of the “common good.” A
September 2016 New York Times piece indicated
that President Obama often stated that climate
change “is the greatest long-term threat facing the world, and that
“he believes that his efforts to slow the warming of the planet
will be the most consequential legacy of his presidency.”

But
the election of Donald Trump puts this legacy in great jeopardy. Although Trump has recently said that he is open-minded about climate change, during his campaign he declared global warming and climate change a “hoax,” promised to “cancel the Paris Climate Agreement [of December 2015], and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs.” There is some evidence, as one August 2016
article indicated, that Trump increased
global-warming denial among Republicans. And there is no doubt that
those who voted for Trump and insured
Republican control over all branches of government were much more
likely than Clinton voters to agree, as many Republicans do, that
global warming is a hoax or a minor matter.

Since “education
is the strongest predictor of a belief that climate change is real,”
and Trump did much better among voters without a college degree, it
is tempting to think that many of the pro-Trump voters were just
uneducated about the realities of climate change. Yet the correlation
between educational levels and climate-change belief is
less in the United States than in most
other countries.

If
not educational level, how about age as a main consideration? When
one considers that Trump received most of his support from those 45
and older, is it possible that many of them shared the sentiment
attributed to King Louis XV of France or his lover before the
French Revolution, “Après moi le deluge” (After me the
deluge). And the words seem strangely appropriate considering the
massive flooding of coastal areas that could well result as global
warming worsens. But most old deniers are not that callous toward
succeeding generations who will suffer most because many older voters
dismiss such dire warnings as just overblown rhetoric.

Other words as
expressed in the title The Gathering Storm, which Winston
Churchill gave to the first volume of his multi-volumed The Second
World War, seem most fitting to express the increasing climate
change dangers that we face. And it is in that volume that the
British statesman chronicled his warnings against Hitler and how
often they were ignored. Perhaps we can learn something from it that
will help us better understand why people ignore oncoming great
dangers, whether they are perpetrated by Hitler or global warming.

Even
before Hitler became the German chancellor in January 1933, Churchill
was warning the British politicians and public that Germany must not
be allowed to match French armament levels. He was
aware that many people in his country
believed that the peace treaty imposed upon Germany after World War I
was too one-sided and had contributed to German just
grievances. He himself was open to negotiating
some revisions, but to allow German “anything like equality
of armaments . . . would be almost to appoint the day for another
European war.”

From 1933 to 1939
Hitler pursued increasingly aggressive actions, often violating the
terms of the Treaty of Versailles imposed upon Germany in 1919. In
early 1935, he announced that he intended to reintroduce military
conscription and increase the size of the German armed forces. In
March 1936, he sent troops into the Rhineland, the demilitarized
German territory bordering with France—he later stated: “If the
French had then marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to
withdraw with our tails between our legs.” From 1936 to 1939,
Germany gave military support to General Franco’s forces in the
Spanish Civil War. In March 1938, Hitler succeeded in bringing a Nazi
to power in Austria and obtaining an invitation for Germany to occupy
the nation, which it did. In September of that year British Prime
Minister Neville Chamberlain in the infamous Munich Agreement
accepted, along with French and Italian leaders, terms that soon
allowed Germany to take over the Czechoslovakian “Sudetenland.”
(In The Gathering Storm, Churchill later quoted a German
general’s response to the question of whether the German army would
have attacked Czechoslovakia if the Western powers had not appeased:
“Certainly not.”)

Only at the end of
March 1939, after Germany had taken over more of Czechoslovakia, and
Lithuania had ceded to Germany the city of Memel, and Hitler had
increased his demands upon Poland, did Chamberlain announce that he
and the French leaders had agreed to back Poland fully if it was
threatened. But up until Britain declared war on Germany on 2
September, a day after Germany invaded Poland, could anyone be sure
that Chamberlain would not once again find a way to appease Hitler by
giving in to his demands?

As Hitler increased
his aggressive policies, so too (in the House of Commons and British
press) did Churchill step up his criticism of them and of the British
government for appeasing him. He spoke against reducing Air Force
spending and urged more military preparedness. He warned that as soon
as Germany thought it was strong enough to challenge France,
countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania,
Austria, and the Baltic States would be threatened, and some would be
taken over by force. He also feared that attacks against Jews could
spread to areas like Poland. He urged Britain to lead the effort in
forming an “effective union” of countries threatened by Germany
(the League of Nations had proved itself ineffective).

A major country that
he wished to be part of this union was the USSR. For more than a
decade and a half he had been known as a virulent anti-communist, but
he now considered Nazism a more odious danger. The British
government, however, did not share his enthusiasm for an anti-Nazi
coalition that would include the Soviet Union. Neville Chamberlain,
who became prime minister in mid-1937, believed that communism still
remained a greater menace than Nazism.

After Austria was
taken over in early 1938, Churchill warned that Czechoslovakia was
the next country likely to be threatened. Although Chamberlain
thought
the Munich Agreement was “a triumph for British diplomacy,”
Churchill declared it “a disaster of the first magnitude,” and
not just for Czechoslovakia, but also for Great Britain and France.

The day after
Britain declared war on Germany, Churchill was appointed First Lord
of the Admiralty, thereby becoming part of Chamberlain's War Cabinet.
And in May 1940, he replaced Chamberlain as prime minister. But why
did it take Britain six to seven years to realize that Churchill’s
assessment of Hitler and how to deal with him was better than that of
Chamberlain and other appeasers?

The answer to this
question gives us insights into why global-warming deniers and
minimizers refuse to perceive our “gathering storm.” In
the 1930s, as today, other matters were more important to voters. In
the mid-1930s one politician stated
that “there was probably a stronger pacifist feeling running
through this country than at any time since the War [WWI].”
Remembrance of the horrors and appalling death toll of that war, plus
the reluctance to spend limited government funds on military needs as
the Great Depression continued, help explain the pacifism of many
British citizens. Others believed that communism still remained a
greater menace than Nazism.

In 2016 most voters
thought numerous other issues more important than climate-change
dangers: e.g., jobs and economic wellbeing, terrorism, immigration,
foreign affairs, and morality issues like abortion and same-sex
marriage. Among Christians, excluding Hispanic Catholics, Trump
supporters outnumbered
Clinton ones by a 3-to-2 margin. Many white Catholics, who supported
Trump by the same margin, apparently were not greatly influenced by
Pope Francis’s 2015 climate encyclical. In this regard, they
mirrored
the attitude of Catholic Republicans in Congress.

But Trump supporters
and Republicans generally, like most British citizens in the 1930s,
failed to exercise political wisdom when they voted in early
November. They failed to grasp how terribly important it is for the
common good to battle against the “gathering storm” of global
warming. As the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin once noted,
political wisdom necessitates “a highly developed discrimination of
what matters from the rest.” As another thinker stated about wisdom
generally, it aims “toward the achievement of a common good. . . .
[It] is not just about maximizing one’s own or someone else’s
self-interest, but about balancing various self-interests
(intrapersonal) with the interests of others (interpersonal) and of
other aspects of the context in which one lives (extrapersonal), such
as one’s city or country or environment or even God.” In his
address to the U.S Congress in September 2015, Pope Francis agreed
that the “pursuit
of the common good . . . is the chief aim of all politics.”

Political
wisdom also involves engaging
and arousing the imagination and emotions.
In the 1930s, Churchill attempted in his speeches and writings about
the “gathering storm” to awaken such among the British people. In
her 2016 campaign, however, Hillary Clinton failed to come close to
matching Churchill’s intensity about our own “gathering storm”
of climate-change consequences.

If
British voters had heeded Churchill’s warnings earlier, they might
well have prevented much of the carnage and terrible destructiveness
of World War II, including the Holocaust. Someday, after global
warming has wreaked a vicious vengeance on our continent and those of
other peoples, Americans deniers and minimizers may also well rue
their years of ignoring the dangers of our own “gathering storm,”
global warming.